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Many people honestly believe that the ancestry of mankind has been mapped faithfully and nearly completely. They have heard about missing links,
Is it nearly complete or are there missing links?
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They have heard about missing links, and regard them as scientific proof for man's evolution from primates.
How can missing links be 'proof'?
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However, in truth, no ancestor for man has ever been documented.
Except the ones that have been documented.
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The missing links are still missing.
That is tautological. The links that are not missing are just links.
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Homo sapiens neanderthalensis (Neandertal man) - 150 years ago Neandertal reconstructions were stooped and very much like an 'ape-man'. It is now admitted that the supposedly stooped posture was due to disease and that Neandertal is just a variation of the human kind.
150 years ago we didn't know about helium, the germ theory of disease, weather forecasting, Maxwell relations, Rayleigh Scattering, oceanography, Boltzmann equations, the photoconductivity of selenium, thermionic emisisons, Mycobacterium leprae, heroin, DDT, Antarctica, Bacillus anthracis, silent dog whistles, telephone communication, Phobos and Deimos, Iguanadon, scandium, Venn diagrams, piezoelectric effects, the transmission of yellow fever, that squaring the circle is impossible, cathode rays, protons or the function of the pancreas.
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Ramapithecus - once widely regarded as the ancestor of humans, it has now been realized that it is merely an extinct type of orangutan (an ape).
An ancestor to orangutans. A view held for like 50 years.
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Eoanthropus (Piltdown man) - a hoax based on a human skull cap and an orangutan's jaw. It was widely publicized as the missing link for 40 years.
Yes, and it would have proven a challenge to the biogeographical evidence for the evolution of humanity. So thank goodness modern science was capable of understanding its true nature.
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Hesperopithecus (Nebraska man) - based on a single tooth of a type of pig now only living in Paraguay.
Was not accepted by scientific consensus and was definitively rejected within a few years.
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Australopithecus africanus - this was at one time promoted as the missing link. It is no longer considered to be on the line from apes to humans. It is very ape-like.
Since humans are apes, our ancestors must be very ape-like, or even apes themselves.
Sure, we can quibble over the particulars but for me the point is a pretty obvious trend; that evolution is promoted but then vanquished by later discoveries.
Evolution is still accepted as the explanation for the diversity of apes and hominids. It has not been vanquished.
For all those who will quibble, "link got this fact wrong, link said X is so when it isn't". Yeah...you can do that if you want but still, it's just not a very convincing STORY.
If you want a story, go pick up a story book. In the meantime scientists will continue to attempt to reconstruct natural history.
The Great Apes (Hominidae) appear about 15mya
Pierolapithecus and other Homininae appear about 13mya
Sahelanthropus and Orrorin and other Hominini at about 6-7mya
Australopithecus about 3-4mya, a cousin group of the family Hominidae and potentially part of the group that is ancestral to Homo
Kenyanthropus about 3mya, closely related to Australopithecus
This is about where the resolution of the record starts to become fuzzy enough to not be definitively clear but
about 2.5 mya Homo Habilis appears. Despite what Christian Answers tells you there is no 'growing consensus' that it is an 'invalid taxon'. About 15 years ago some people first proposed this might be the case, but the consensus remains that they are a 'valid' taxon.
1.8 mya - Homo Erectus. It is expected that earlier forms than apes would be smaller than humans, so I'm not sure what CA's point is in saying this as a problem. It is also expected that ancestral forms would start having overlaps with extant humans, although the overlap is very slight (average cranial size about 600 cubic centimetres vs 1200 for humans).
Homo ergaster - 1.4mya. Early examples have cranial sizes of up to 900 cubic centimetres, later examples close to 1100.
Homo heidelbergensi/Homo antecessor - 700kya. Cranial sizes around 1250 cubic centimetres
Homo neanderthalensis - 500kya
Homo sapiens - 250kya
We know, given fossil scarcity of hominids, we aren't likely to find direct ancestors which we can be 100% confident are direct ancestors. But we've do have a fair amount of information on how the hominid branch of apes changed over time leading us to the modern extant groups of gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and humans and the explanation for these changes has remained consistent for over 150 years: they evolved.
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